October 9. Last night, decided that I had yielded to my nerves long enough.  Stayed at home, and didn’t ask for a guard either.  Being much exhausted by two nights of wakefulness, slept soundly all night.  To-day the world looks bright and fresh, and my late terrors inexplicable.

October 12. Poor M——­ has the cholera.  His duties as a road overseer have taken him into the province, and he has been forced to eat native food.  He got a bottle of chlorodyne and seemed to feel that it would save him.

But to-day he is down.  Mr, S——­ brought the news when he came by to take me for an afternoon walk.  We met the inspector and the padre, coming from M——­’s house.  Extreme unction had been given him and all hope of recovery was gone, though both American physicians had been with him all day and were making every effort to save him.  He asked for Mr. S——­, so the latter left me to go to his bedside.

At seven o’clock Mr. S——­ went by in the dusk, and called to me from the street to send his dinner up to his house.  Poor M——­ had just died.  Mr. S——­ held his hand to the last, and was on his way home to burn his shoes and clothing and to take a bath in bichloride.

Most of the American men went in to see M——.  I am glad of it.  It may not be sanitary, but it is revolting to think of an American dying alone in a Filipino hut.

M——­ was buried to-night.  I saw the funeral go by.  First came the body in the native coffin, smeared with quicklime.  The escort wagon loomed up behind in the starlight, full of American men, and then came the scout officer and his wife in the spring wagon.  M——­ was once a private in the Eighteenth Infantry.

Just after this mournful little procession went by with its queer muffled noises, the big church bell boomed ten, and the constabulary bugles from the other end of the town blew taps.  The sound came faintly clear on the still night air, and the tall cocoanut tree that I love to watch from my window drooped its dim outline as if it mourned.

October 15. The weather remains bright and hot in spite of our continual prayers for rain.  The natives say a heavy rain and wind will “blow the cholera away.”  The deaths have now swelled to more than a hundred a day, though the disease remains largely among the poor.  Yesterday I saw a man stricken in the street.  He lay on his back quite still, but breathing in a horrible way.  The bearers came at last and carried him away on a stretcher.  Two cases were taken out of the house next door to me.

October 16. Ceferiana professed to be ill this morning, and I was alarmed.  I dosed her with the medicine which Dr. S——­ had given me when the epidemic first appeared, and sent for the Doctor himself.  But I discovered, before he came, that she had gotten too close a whiff of the chloride-of-lime bag, and it nauseated her.  She is more afraid of the disinfectants than of the disease.